No Room in the Inn? Go Straight to Jail

IF MARY AND JOSEPH were living in Missouri today and had to make their own shelter after the innkeepers turned them away, Jesus would be greeted by police officers instead of shepherds. Why? In January, Missouri initiated a new statewide law criminalizing homelessness. The law (and similar laws in several states) is based on template legislation from the Cicero Institute, a right-wing group that peddles legal schemes that limit effective solutions and strip support from people who can’t afford a place to live. If Moses and his tribe were wandering in Tennessee, a law that went into effect in July — supported by Cicero — allows for felony charges for pitching a tent on state-owned property.

Across the country, politicians are passing laws that penalize our neighbors who can’t afford a place to live and who must sleep, shelter, and conduct other life-sustaining activities in public. We have seen the results of those laws at the local level when city councils come up with ineffective — and plain bad  — ideas to deal with homelessness. Now there is a well-funded, coordinated push to raise those bad ideas to the state level.

In the last legislative session, the Cicero Institute sent lobbyists out with state legislators to do door-knocking in at least six states and funded slickly produced videos for the general public to push a simple narrative that blames those who can’t afford or can’t find housing. This “blame the poor” game doesn’t account for what Americans already know: High inflation and higher rents are forcing people to live on the streets. The reason is plain: There is “no room at the inn.” The number of unhoused people exceeds the number of shelter beds in most communities, and there’s a 7-million-unit shortage of affordable rentals. Almost nowhere in the country can a minimum-wage worker afford a one-bedroom apartment. A worker would need triple that salary. Yet the Cicero Institute wants to misdirect our attention toward policies that address the desires of wealthier residents to hide poverty through policing, rather than address the basic human needs of poorer Americans.

Joe Lonsdale, a libertarian tech billionaire with venture capital investments in private prisons, founded the Cicero Institute in Austin, Texas, in 2018. (A software company Lonsdale co-founded, according to Stateline, has products used for “migrant surveillance systems, predictive policing, and battlefield management.”) Following Austin City Council’s 2019 rollback of ordinances banning camping, panhandling, and sitting and lying in public, Cicero successfully pushed Texas Gov. Greg Abbott to pass a statewide camping ban to override the local decriminalization efforts. Based on the success of this state-override strategy, Cicero turned that Texas bill into a template for state legislation elsewhere.

Here’s my assessment of four key components of the template. First, implement a statewide camping ban with penalties of up to $5,000 and one month in jail, plus state funding cuts on any local jurisdiction that refuses to enforce the ban. Second, divert all federal and state funding for homeless services away from evidence-based housing and services (such as the “housing first” model) to short-term, state-run encampments and emergency shelters with short time limits and paternalistic programming requirements (subject to immediate removal for failure to comply). Grant immunity from liability to encampment operators for all but grossly negligent conduct. Third, lower due process protections to make it easier to involuntarily commit people experiencing homelessness to state psychiatric institutions, paired with threat of jail or $5,000 fines for noncompliance with outpatient treatment. Fourth, divert dollars for homeless services to police to create homeless outreach teams that require law enforcement to force unhoused people into state-run encampments under threat of arrest.

Cicero lobbyists cloak their intentions with misdirection and scant facts, often claiming they don’t want to criminalize people and that legal encampments or shelters would be better for those living on the streets. But Cicero’s template bill forces localities to enforce the homelessness bans regardless of whether shelter even exists or risk a lawsuit from the state attorney general and loss of homelessness funding. Further, the bill’s explicit waiver of liability for camp and shelter operators for all but extreme negligence signals they expect the conditions in those facilities to be so bad that the only way people would go is under threat of arrest.

There is some good news: When elected officials hear the facts, and the stories of people who have lived through criminalization for being unhoused, they do the right thing. In Georgia, a bipartisan Senate study committee looked at Cicero’s proposal and rejected almost every part of it. The national Housing Not Handcuffs campaign organizes thousands of people to fight Cicero’s bills.

To be our “brother’s keeper” (Genesis 4:9) today requires organized, proactive education of state officials about the harms of criminalizing or institutionalizing unhoused people and the benefits of providing enough interim and permanent housing to allow everyone a path to thrive and live with dignity.